


Lucinda and Sirius

by LadyBinx



Series: Lucinda Baker [11]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Smut, Hogwarts, Shrieking Shack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 22:35:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8818810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyBinx/pseuds/LadyBinx
Summary: Lucinda's history with Sirius Black





	

**Author's Note:**

> I set my friend a challenge a few years ago to write me a story set within the HP world that did not include the Golden Trio. These are those stories.

People sometimes ask me why I have such a problem with authority, and with the Ministry in particular. Apart from their inability to pay an independent contractor on time, and their insistence that taxes are paid with incredible regularity, there is also a deeply personal reason.

The story begins when I was very, very young, in my first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I knew almost nothing of the wizarding world. It can be hard starting a new school, but for a muggle-born going to Hogwarts it is doubly so. And for a muggle-born that gets sorted into Slytherin, it is triply so. I was a scared, uncertain, shy little girl being plunged into a world of magic, cruelty and racism. It was terrible.

The pure-blood bullies did awful things to me, especially in that first year. I was hounded through the school, dangled from the castle walls, tricked into going into the Forbidden Forest, embarrassed and humiliated regularly. The boys were bad enough, but I had to share a room with the girls. There was always some devious little plot brewing in their brain. Cursed paint in my socks, fleas in my bed, filling my quill with exploding ink, mashed potato in my bed. They were always pretending they could speak Parseltongue, and I was so young and naïve, how could I know any better?

Once, a whole bunch of them were chasing me down a corridor after classes had ended for the day, firing curses at me and calling me horrible names – mudblood, Loose Lucy, and worse things for a little girl to hear. One of the curses caught me on the back of the head, and transformed my nose into the slimy, bristly snout of a pig. I was already crying, completely abandoned to misery once more, not caring about the snot dribbling down my face from my pig-nose. It would mean one more embarrassing, scary trip to the infirmary and the rough hands of Madam Srimgeour, the elderly nurse.

Instead, I turned a corner and bumped into a tall boy with long dark hair and haunted blue eyes, who took one look at me said,

“Get behind me.” 

As the bullies rounded the corner, he fired at them with similar curses, and magic flew across the corridors noisily, with lights and explosions. He laughed joyously as the chaos exploded around him. “There’s loads of you! And only one of me! Come on, you can do better than that!” The Slytherins were sent scrambling behind statues or retreating. “This way,” the boy told me, grabbing my hand and leading me away down the corridor through the smoke before any teachers showed up.

We hid an old classroom.

“I recognise you,” he said, “You’re one of the first years. Why were they chasing you? It’s a muggle-born thing, I guess?”

“Yeah,” I said, snivelling sadly. “Thanks for saving me.”

“Well, don’t thank me yet,” he said, drawing his wand. I was so used to the cruelty by this point that I winced away from it.

“What are you going to do?!” I squeaked.

“Don’t worry, I’m just going to try to fix your nose. I remember it was very pretty. Let’s see if we can’t make it so again, eh?”

“Is it dangerous?” I asked, blushing from the compliment from a handsome older boy but still concerned about the wand pointed at my face.

“Not at all. If I do a bad job, I’ll take you to the infirmary myself. How does that sound?”

“Okay,” I said, smiling slightly as he put his fingers on my chin and gently turned my head from side to side, inspecting my nose closely. I remember feeling his breath on my skin.

He said a spell clumsily, and his wand-movements were awkward and uncertain, but they did the job. I felt the pig-nose vanish. He tilted my head from side to side once more, then beeped my nose like a button with one elegant finger. It felt perfectly fine!

“There we go. A pretty nose for a pretty face,” he said. I actually giggled, turning bright red. “I’m Sirius.”

“My name is Lucinda.”

“A pretty nose for a pretty face with a pretty name,” he said with a grin. I giggled again, and squirmed girlishly.

From that moment on, I was besotted. I was still being bullied, but whenever I could escape them I would linger somewhere in the background of Sirius Black, watching his every movement. I would stare at him from across the Great Hall, and follow him down to the lake where the older kids used to hang out. Sometimes I would hang around the entrance to the Gryffindor common room, waiting for him to come out, but I’d always have to pretend I was just on my way past. It seems stupid now, how obvious I was. I would doodle his name in the back of my school books, surrounding it with hearts and stars and flowers, or I would doodle my own name with his last, as if I were married to him. Sometimes I would try to draw his face, but these were the scribblings of a thirteen year old.

At the same time, I was making friends with the elves. I’ve always been very curious and observant, and most kids don’t even realise there are house-elves in Hogwarts. It’s difficult to make friends with a race of people so enslaved and subservient, but they helped me clean my cursed socks and get the mashed potato out of my bed. From them, I learnt many of the secret passages around the castle. The place is fairly riddled with them. It made it easier to stalk Sirius.

This went on for about two years. The change happened when I was being chased once more, clutching my school books to my chest and running determinedly. I’d learnt to serpentine to elude their clumsy curses, and I was sprinting down the corridor, confident I could lose the bullies by ducking into one of the secret passages. I ran headfirst into Sirius as he came around a corner with his friends, and I dropped my books.

“Are they bothering you again?” he demanded, and his friends were drawing their wands. There was quite a pitched battle, during which I hunkered down in the corner between the floor and the wall, watching Sirius and his friends revel in the magical battle. The Slytherins – the  _ other _ Slytherins – were defeated and slunk away quickly. One of Sirius’s friends, Remus, leant down and helped me pick up my books. One of them had fallen open at the most embarrassing page possible, covered with doodles of Sirius’s name. Remus looked at me, smiling, and closed the book as he handed it back to me.

“Why don’t you come down to the lake with us?” he asked me, grinning.

“I know a shortcut we can take,” I said, thankfully.

They were all very impressed with my knowledge of the secret passages. Over the next couple of weeks, I eagerly showed them everything I knew. It might sound like they were using me for my knowledge, but if anything I was using them for protection. And besides, they were really nice guys. Apart from feeling cool for hanging out with older, Gryffindor boys, I also laughed along joyously at their anarchic antics. I rolled my eyes jokingly when they told me they called themselves the marauders.

When I learnt from the elves about a passage that led out of school grounds to an old abandoned house, I couldn’t wait to tell Sirius. I took him there that very evening. We snuck beneath the tree and out of school grounds, just the two of us. I remember the thrill of disobeying the rules, of following the boy I had fancied for months as we quested through a secret corridor, of being alone with him finally.

“This is a really amazing place,” he said, as we checked out the creaking, rickety, shambolic old house. To our young eyes it really was great – a genuine space of privacy.

“It’s not bad,” I said, with false humility.

“You always find the best stuff,” he said as he tried to pull aside one of the curtains, but it was so rotten that it just crumbled in his hands. “Now that we know it’s here, we definitely have to do something with it. We could bring the guys here. This would be perfect for Moony,” he said thoughtfully.

“Why Remus?” I asked, refusing to use the strange nickname. “And aren’t we a little old to be playing with clubhouses?” I said, joking as I came up behind him. I leaned on his shoulder casually as we looked out of the window at the sunset.

“What, you mean like playing doctor and nurse? You show me yours and I’ll show you mine, sort of thing?” he said, grinning and looking down at me.

“If we were in an abandoned hospital then that would be perfect. But it’s just a house,” I said, turning to him.

“We could play husband and wife,” he said as he looked into my eyes.

“Let’s just start with boyfriend and girlfriend, eh?” I suggested with a grin. We had been dancing around the subject for weeks. He leant down to kiss me softly. It was my first kiss, bathed in the light of the sunset, hiding in a shack and breaking important school rules with a boy I had a massive crush on. Our teeth clunked together at one point, but it had that beautiful youthful charm to it. It still does, even when I look back on it.

After that, the four boys told me a lot of their own secrets, but none of the important ones. They showed me where they hid their stolen potion supplies for when it was essential to their mischief. James asked me for advice on how to make Lily like him, but he ignored what I told him and kept on being a hard-headed show-off. I noticed that Remus was ill a lot, but didn’t connect it with the phases of the moon. I was observant, like I said, but I was also naïve.

They took me on my first trip into Hogsmeade and introduced me to butterbeer like they were seasoned drinkers, but of course they had only tried it just a few months ago. With their help, I regained enough confidence in myself to make other friends, including one or two in hated Slytherin. Of course the pure-blood bullies still hated me. Most of Sirius’s family was in Slytherin – his cousin Bella for example. His brother Regulus was even in my year. We had several lessons together. He hated me, and hated that I was with Sirius.

Sirius tried to teach me to duel several times, but I was never any good. We would practise in any space we could – the shack was quite a long walk, and there were plenty of empty classrooms around. He would only ever use harmless spells, and always take the greatest care with me. The first time I managed to knock him down, I was so shocked that I hurried over to help him up. He grasped my hand but pulled me down into his arms, catching me as I fell and kissing me fiercely. We were soon rolling over each other playfully, laughing until we started to get very steamy and intense. He was lying on me, supporting himself on his arms, and I could feel his weight against my body. As he kissed me, I pulled off my jumper. He got the idea, and started undoing my shirt, kissing my chest and neck clumsily. I laughed as his long hair tickled me, and pushed him over, rolling on top of him. 

I was straddling him, pulling off his tie and unbuttoning his shirt with nervously shaking hands. It felt like there was something important happening – I thought this might be  _ it _ , the first time I’d ever have sex. As I unbuttoned his shirt, I discovered his skin was covered in tattoos.

“What is this?” I asked him, thrilling as I stroked his strong shoulders, tracing the long, detailed markings.

“It’s nothing. It’s just a tattoo or two.”

“Or two? They cover your entire chest,” I said as I pulled his shirt off his arms awkwardly, “And your arms! What do they mean?”

“They’re just tattoos. Who says they have to mean anything?”

“Are they on your legs too?” I asked with a grin.

They were.

The experience itself was not as much fun as I’d been led to believe, at first. There was some pain. The second time was much, much better, considering that neither of us knew what we were doing. Soon we were doing it every possible chance we got, turning the shack into a love nest most weekends. It wasn’t much, but it was a place where we could get together. We’d bring food from the great hall and make a day of it, experimenting and playing with each other until we were sore. I loved the feeling of his weight on me, the way he’d move me around, the noises he made when he came. He would laugh at my O-face, and I’d laugh at his. I was fascinated by his penis, since obviously I’d never seen one before. At first he was really awkward about being naked around me, but he grew more comfortable. We were very experimental. When the other students started calling it the shrieking shack, I thought it was because of  _ us _ .

The fact that there were rumours going around the school about this place being haunted was irrelevant to us, because we were young and foolhardy and in love. It was only a minor nuisance when they planted a whomping willow over the entrance to the passage, because somehow Sirius knew how to calm it down and let us pass. Of course, looking back, I’m amazed by my own blindness.

I was idly flicking through library books, avoiding the Slytherins and their habitual hunt-the-mudblood games while I waited to meet Sirius. That was how I came up with the idea of researching Sirius’s tattoos. Clearly there was something he was hiding, and like I said, I’ve always been curious. It only took three or four books before I realised he was an unregistered animagus.

“Sirius,” I said as I lay with my head on his chest, snuggled beneath a blanket in the shack one night.

“Lucinda,” he replied, stroking my hair.

“I know what the tattoos do, I think.”

“Oh yeah?”

“They let you transform into an animal, don’t they,” I said softly. He froze, like he’d been caught out in some guilty secret. As much as I liked him, the sensation of exposing him did make me smile.

“Um…”

“What sort of animal? Can you show me?” I pushed. He rolled out from under me and stood in front of me naked, flexing his muscles from the hard floor as he got up. He turned to look at me, and I stared at his lithe body greedily. Then he started to sprout hair suddenly. Something strange was happening to his legs – like his muscles were morphing and his bones were lengthening. His feet were cracking as they restructured. His face grew long, and his shoulders shrank while his neck thickened, and suddenly I was looking at a big, black hairy dog. He fell to all fours happily, wagging his tail. He was quite cute, even for a big dog. He padded over to me, and suddenly his nickname of ‘Padfoot’ made sense. I wondered if the other marauders were similarly enchanted, to earn their nicknames. I pulled the blanket up around me and sat up, stroking Sirius behind the ear. As he smiled a doggy smile and licked my arm, I couldn’t help but laugh, despite the worrying strangeness.

“Good dog,” I joked, “But please change back now. I’m worried this might count as bestiality.”

The sad look in his canine eyes was heart-wrenching, but he shifted back anyway, and I was looking at a naked Sirius lying next to me. He licked my arm again, looked up at me and grinned.

“You have to promise not to tell anyone. Not even James or the others. I promised them I’d keep it secret.”

“I’m good at secrets,” I said, realising it was true.

“Here’s another one. I love you,” he said, taking me by surprise.

It was shortly after this that we started to drift apart, sadly. I was spending more and more time studying mermish and talking to the merpeople in the lake, fascinated by their history and culture. I was also becoming more interested in the elves as a people, rather than just as servants. Sirius meanwhile was spending more time practising duelling, which I think helped him vent the frustration he felt about his family. When the four marauders showed me a map they’d made detailing all the secret passages, and the clever enchantments they’d protected it with, I was quietly very upset that I hadn’t been given at least a little credit. After all, I’d been the one who told them almost everything.

We’d been together for almost five months when I started worrying that he wasn’t serious about me. I had just turned sixteen, and I thought everything was  _ so _ important. For weeks I pressured him to stand up to his family, to tell them that he loved me, otherwise it wouldn’t be true. We shouldn’t have to skulk around in the shadows. I wanted to see his room, where he stayed when he wasn’t at Hogwarts. I wanted to meet his family’s house-elf. I was young, and secretly I was obsessing over needing to know there was at least at the option we could get married. I wanted Sirius to stand up to his own family like he’d stood up to the bullies of Slytherin. He grew more and more reluctant, and I began to see how much his family terrified him. Eventually we had a long, quiet, tearful discussion and we broke up. Well, he dumped me. I can’t remember the exact words now. They’re not important.

I was inconsolable for weeks. So was he. But eventually we started talking again, and remained friends in a sort of cool, aloof way. He would always remind me that I’d promised not to tell anyone about his status as an unregistered animagus, and it would annoy me that he felt I wasn’t trustworthy. Like I’d just forget one day and blurt it out.

When Sirius was sixteen he’d moved out of his parents’ house after a blazing row with his mother about their favourite topic, the rights of muggle-borns. I’d love to think that the argument was about me. But it had been several months, and we’d both moved on. I was with another boy, and Sirius was plainly enjoying the attention of the girls now that I was out of the picture.

I often wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t pushed him to stand up to his family. Would he have moved out anyway? Would I have come to visit him at James Potter’s house, flying my broomstick alongside Lily’s as we gossiped on the way? As I’ve grown up I’ve gone very off the idea of marriage, but we might still have been together even now. When Sirius and James decided Sirius wouldn’t be secret-keeper to the Potter’s hidden house, they instead made that treacherous rat Pettigrew the key to discovering their location. If I had been there, would they have picked me? I’m  _ very  _ good with secrets. Would I have given into the Death Eater’s threats? If I’d stayed with Sirius, would James and Lily still be alive? Would Harry Potter have grown up with parents? Would we be living together in some elegant townhouse, estranged from his family, visiting the Potters and Lupins at weekends and exchanging potion recipes? Would Sirius be dead? Would I be dead?

It’s impossible to say. But even now I wake up in the night sometimes, missing him, wondering.

Of course I knew it wasn’t Sirius who betrayed the Potters. When he was arrested and sentenced without trial, I was furious. The idea that he had killed twelve muggles, even by accident and without meaning to, was ridiculous. I went to each witness, interviewing them, but there was no crumb of hope in that direction. The muggle witnesses had been mind-wiped, and their accounts of the scene were useless. They wouldn’t let me visit Sirius in Azkaban. He wasn’t even allowed to receive letters. I had long arguments with the wizards who had sentenced him, conducted via mail sometimes and more than often surprise conversations as they went about their officious Ministry business. No one was willing to listen to me.

By then I was a noted information-gatherer and rumour-monger, a mover and a shaker amongst many different crowds – from criminals, smugglers and dark wizards to goblins, elves and ghosts. I was causing a tremendous fuss in every circle of contacts I had, trying to stir up support for him. But Voldemort had vanished, the rest of the Death Eaters were being rounded up, and nobody wanted to spend too much time revisiting the issue. It seemed like everyone was willing to just forget Sirius, especially the Ministry. So yes, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder.

Several years later, another of my friends was sent to Azkaban for accidental manslaughter. I went to see him. His name was William Grey, and I’d dated him after Sirius. For much longer, too. The coincidence of their having colours for last names did not escape me. Luckily, I’ve never been involved anyone with the last name of White.

“I can’t believe you have the balls to show up here, Lucinda,” he said as he sat down behind the metal-reinforced window. We were speaking via the enchanted gramophone-like trumpets that dangled down from the top of the window, surrounded by others doing the same desperate, miserable performance.

This was when the dementors were still in charge of Azkaban, and though they kept clear of the visiting rooms their cold, miserable atmosphere still filled the space like a depressing, invisible fog. As concerned as I was for William, I couldn’t help but think of Sirius, who’d been here for almost a decade longer and had no hope of being released.

“I never asked you to turn in the names of all your underground contacts,” I said defensively. William’s hand leapt to the eye patch that covered his empty, cursed eye socket. It was still freshly bruised and swollen. His other eye was gaunt, and his face looked thin and drawn. The prison uniform hung off him like a child wearing a bed sheet. Again, as bad as it was for William, my main concern was Sirius.

“I never thought you’d tell them where I was hidden!” he snapped.

“Well, you’ll be out soon,” I said coldly.

“Why are you here? Haven’t you done enough damage?”

“I was hoping you could carry a message for me,” I said. I knew him too well to bother beating around the bush. He laughed dryly, sarcastically, and I could hear the hate in each breath.

“Sure, just write it on a piece of paper and I’ll smuggle it inside my face! I’ll just stuff it in my fucking eye socket,” he said, growing angrier.

“Would you mind?” I said, cheekily. He fumed for several long moments, glancing over his shoulder at the ominous presence of the dementor lurking in the air outside the prisoner’s entrance to the visiting chamber. I wondered what he was considering.

“You know, you’re going to pay for this when I get out of here,” he hissed.

“I’m sure I can get you tobacco,” I said. That made him pause, derailing his bitterness. After a long tense moment while he narrowed his eye at me, he sighed heavily.

“What’s the fucking message, then?”

“I want you to tell Sirius something.”

“Oh, right, Sirius Black. Still on about him, eh?”

“Have you seen him?”

“Yeah. What do you want me to say?”

“Uh…” I said, realising there was no appropriate message I could pass to William. Even if Sirius had been here in front of me, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

“Tell him… tell him I’m… That I’m thinking about him,” I finished lamely.

I received a letter from Azkaban a few days afterwards in my main mailbox, stating that William had requested another visit from me urgently. Once more in the visitor chamber, William’s anger had a touch of pity to it as he told me Sirius’s reply.

“I told him what you said. He said to tell you to stop. He says to let go and forget about him, like the rest of the world has. Uh, I’m sorry. I still get tobacco, right? I really need some fucking tobacco.”

I tried to do as he asked, but the long years went on and I still regularly wondered about what might have been. I wondered if he was alright, if he was healthy, if he was thinking of me or if the dementors had sucked away even those happy, long-ago memories.

When news reached me that he’d escaped – several hours before the papers reported it and the wizarding world started to react – I was overjoyed. For a brief moment I had the delusion that he’d escaped to find me. But of course, he had broken out to find the still-alive Pettigrew and protect his god-son. I searched for him, hunting in every boarding house, hotel, brothel, squat and homeless shelter. I checked every cave, grotto, cellar and attic. I cast locator spells, hunting spells, asked every contact I knew. Nobody had seen Sirius the human, and I dared not ask anyone about Sirius the dog.

I checked his family’s house regularly, but it was long empty. More than that, Ministry guards were watching it. He would never have returned to that place by choice, anyway. He had left 12 Grimmauld Place when he was sixteen and as far as I knew, he’d never ever been back. Eventually the Ministry stopped watching it, believing him to be far abroad and out of their jurisdiction. Every now and then I would make an attempt to find him, too, but he didn’t make any attempt to contact me so after some time I started to grow bitter about him.

A lot was going on at that time. There were wild rumours about Voldemort returning, about Dumbledore having a secret army. The Ministry had seized control at Hogwarts to try and protect their authority from the supposedly seditious coup that the headmaster had been planning. I just happened to be talking to Mundungus Fletcher one day on an unrelated matter concerning some expired and highly illegal rattlesnake venom, when he was summoned away. He was very suspicious about the whole thing, whatever the secret meeting was, so my curiosity was piqued. With nothing better to do that day I followed him, and realised with dismay that we were headed to 12 Grimmauld Place, the Black ancestral residence. But the location was now magically secret, and only those who had been enchanted by the secret-keeper were permitted to even view the location. It was immediately even more suspicious.

I lingered outside the missing house sometimes, wondering who was looking out of the invisible windows. One day it was raining and I thought I’d pop by, just to look at the vacant space in the street where the Black house should be. But as I glanced towards it, walking down the street, I saw it appearing. Sirius himself was standing in the street, beckoning me to hurry.

I rushed through the rain and looked at him in disbelief. His hair was long, his beard and moustache were thick and damp. He put a finger to my lips and ushered me inside the house without saying a word. Only when the door was shut and he was sure the house was once again invisible did he say anything.

“Lucinda,” he breathed happily.

“Sirius,” I said, hugging him tightly.

“I’ve seen you outside in the street sometimes. I’m sorry, I couldn’t come out and say anything. Dumbledore himself keeps me locked up in here like a damn canary,” he apologised, hugging me back.

“How are you? Are you well?” I demanded, not letting go, memorising the way he felt against me.

“Oh Lucinda. When I was in Azkaban, did William tell you what I told him to? To forget me, to move on, to get over me?”

“He did,” I said, suddenly feeling quite tearful.

“And?”

“I didn’t,” I said, half-laughing and half-sobbing, feeling his strength as he pulled me in another embrace.

“It gave me comfort to imagine you were thinking of me. The dementors don’t let you have many happy memories, and it was almost all stolen away. I worried about you worrying about me, and that was as good as it got. But it was something wonderful.”

“What are you doing here, locked up by Dumbledore?” I asked.

“That’s another story. Actually, you can probably be useful,” he said as he let me go.

“Well, alright. But I want something in return,” I said, looking up at him.

“What, money? I have the whole Black family fortune-” he started but I interrupted him with empty laughter – with any other person that would be exactly what I wanted to hear; at least an exchange of information, certainly. But this was a special case.

“No, nothing like that. I’ve always wondered, Sirius, what your bedroom looked like. You know how much I wanted to see where you spent your time away from Hogwarts,” I grinned. He laughed happily, grinning back, and kissed me. His whiskers tickled, but his lips were surprisingly soft.

It turned out his bedroom hadn’t changed much since he’d left, long years ago. There were empty bottles of alcohol lying around, but the rest was all charmingly immature. There were lots of Gryffindor scarves, jumpers and posters pinned to the walls and dangling from the top of the four-poster bed. Several old trophies were lined up on the old mantelpiece. There were also unmoving, muggle posters of bikini-clad women posing with guns, motorbikes and muscle-cars. There were enchanted posters of motorbikes on their own, roaring along or posing by art-deco diners. There were newspaper clippings, some framed and mounted on the walls. Most concerned Voldemort, both in the original war and his new rumoured return that the Ministry seemed so eager to deny. Clearly this was a boy who had flaunted the rebellion against his family’s values.

I laughed as I took it all in, and turned to hug him once more.

“It’s all a bit immature,” he said apologetically, “But I haven’t had the heart to take it all down.”

“I love it,” I said, gazing up at him, “I love it.”

He brushed the hair from my face and I leaned into his touch, closing my eyes and savouring being so close to him again. 

“Such a pretty nose.” He whispered in the night. Suddenly I kissed him again, and before I knew it we were undressing each other.

I spent the night there. He’d been locked away for many years, denied the sexual growth that I’d had, so I was pretty sure I stunned him. Nevertheless, he more than made up for it with his eagerness, his ferocity and his intensity. It was both wholly similar and entirely different to when we’d been together that first time in a different abandoned house, just two blushing kids exploring each other’s bodies.

As we relaxed on the bed in the small hours of the morning, the sun growing light outside, he rolled over in bed and kissed my shoulder. Then he licked it, and grinned up at me happily. I laughed sleepily, and tousled his hair.

“Good dog,” I joked.

In the morning I had business to take care of, but I promised I’d return that evening. I’d bring all the makings of a romantic meal and I could disturb the long loneliness he’d felt in that hated house.

But that was the night Voldemort returned.

He had invaded the Ministry with his Death Eaters. That was the night Dumbledore returned too, seizing back control of Hogwarts and proving triumphantly to the whole wizarding world that he had been right. That was the night that everyone started calling for Cornelius Fudge’s resignation. That was the night the second war against Voldemort started. And it was the night Sirius Black was killed inside the Ministry. 

He gave his life for the son of his long-dead friend.

Amongst the chaos that reigned throughout the wizarding world in the days that followed, it seemed like almost nobody had any time for the funerals of those who had fallen inside the Ministry that night. I had my own mourning ceremony for Sirius while it seemed the wizard world was about to forget him once more. I swore that if I ever found Bellatrix, I would destroy her utterly. And I tried, certainly. But ultimately that privilege fell to another. I spoke with Harry Potter several times about his dead god-father, but it was an awkward, miserable experience. I was so jealous of the time and devotion that Sirius had shown him.

Ultimately I was once more left with nothing but sweet memories – and the desperate curiosity about what might have been, in another, happier version of the world. And of course, a very pretty nose.


End file.
